I was happy till I started comparing myself to others. I was happy even in suffering, now I’m unhappy even in luxury. Society hinted to me that there’s a right kind of person, and this is the kind of person you should always look for outside of yourself. That success is a relative term, on a defined (and ever-increasing) base of comparison. And the parameters that make up this base are to be looked for in others. If someone you know has a total of 3 skills, you are unsuccessful if you have only 2; and hence, you are (or should be) unhappy. Every little part that you are made of has a kind of SI unit, a defined (near perfect) specimen that your part must be weighed against. It could be something as small as a nose, or as big as the colour of the skin that covers your whole body. Trying to be a good physicist and trying to reduce the error between the defined absolute and your measured imperfect value, you will forever be suffering.

To be happy, you just need your karma, dharma and santushti to be harmonised. Meaning what you do should satisfy you, without conflicting with your morals and sense of duty.

Every time I think I dislike a person, I remind myself why I shouldn’t.

Why I should try to like that person: There are more than 7 billion people on earth and the number of people I’d have meaningful relations or social interactions (meaningful enough for them to bother me) in my whole life will be what? Definitely less than a thousand. That’s a very small number compared to the number of individuals living and breathing on the planet I reside in. So many persons I will live and die without knowing. So why not choose to stay in harmony with those few that are sent into my surroundings for me to know?

There are some people I like because of the part they play in my life, in improving my life’s quality, and others I like for the part they play in my existence on earth.

Hrithik 1/Rohit gets normal under Jadoo’s influence and goes around like James Bond. Finally Jadoo gifts him this normalcy, so Rohit becomes this smart scientist, but is speaking like Priyanka Chopra in Barfi. What’s that?

Kangana Ranaut’s character is basically a chutney of Mystique, Rogue and Shadowcat.

Vivek Oberoi’s character seems like a young and bad Stephen Hawking, again with mutant powers. He can also be thought of as Professor X, with a zoological garden instead of Xavier Institute. But then he has a gang of anti-Xmen, so maybe he’s Magneto.

I strongly believe in individuality, and that a person is a whole complex amazing system, packed in what is externally seen as just a skin of a certain complexion. And to belittle that by stereotyping him/her, for example saying all the people who have the Sun Sign Aries are impatient, seems wrong to me. But just as we are a part of a species, i.e. categorised in some terms, we ought to get categorised based on the community we become a part of or are born in. And although if you are categorised in a group that sounds good to you, like ‘fun guys’, you take pride in it; and the moment you get categorised into something that’s not so complimenting or glorifying, you want to remove stereotyping from the society.

So again, hi, I’m an Indian. I really want to work toward getting a good job, one that pays really well. You know I want to buy all those expensive products from foreign markets, that awesome car from the German company, I want to take a few trips to see all the beautiful places and people in Europe, and my ultimate aim in work is to get posted to America. I try to get a chance to go work with the under-privileged humans of the society, so that I can post a picture on Facebook. My friends will ‘like’ the picture, everybody will respect me because I decided to go be around and help people who are beneath me. I’m not really into politics. I’ve not read our constitution, I don’t know my rights or responsibilities, my daughter’s rights or the those of my driver; but I love to read, neh study, I have a PhD in some fancy electronics/physics course. You know if my academic career doesn’t work out, I’m going to go for the entertainment industry, become a celebrated comedian by make a joke of my community. I am also a person of high integrity, I take pride in my family. If a person of another religion/caste says a word about my own, there will be bloodbath, or at least a cold war and lots of bias against even a child of that other family. Gandhiji is as important to me as God. Lastly, I am a girl who likes to travel alone in public transport vehicles, fall in love with a stranger, and sing songs with him.

That’s how my community would describe me. But if you want to know how I describe myself, here it is.

I am not really sure what work I want to do, but really, I like work that I can see having meaning to a common person like me. Of course I want to earn a bunch of money, but only enough to keep my family and myself satiated and safe. I want to have pictures on Facebook with a lot of different people, not as my projects, but as my friends. Politics seriously don’t interest me. I’m not the brightest person, but I like to read novels and kids’ science. I will read the constitution anyway, as a responsibility, as a necessity, so that I can proudly, without a doubt, say that I’m a learned person. I don’t take any pride whatsoever in my religion/caste, I take pride in being a good human. I also believe that our armed forces are a little messed up. Those who have the helpers and the subsidised food and alcohol mostly are far away from the front, those who die at the front are those who had joined the forces as the only means of earning a livelihood for their family. But I do respect Gandhiji, and am proud of all the freedom fighters. And although I avoid strangers, for my safety, I am proud of our culture, it’s music, dance, art and colours.

I am an Indian. Though there’s always room for improvement, this is a category/community/class/stereotype I do take pride in.

A few months back I wrote an article that talked about a particular emotional expression, i.e. the smile. I gave 3 theories of why we smile when we see another person smile. Yesterday I read something that disillusioned me.

I thought of these theories independently, without ever reading about them anywhere else. These theories were novel. It turns out, these were novel to me, yes, but not to the world.

The first point is rather vague, it theorizes that the other person smiling at us implies that (s)he likes us, hence, we are flattered and smile back.

The next point is more sensible, which now i realise is because Charles Darwin had already suggested something like that in his book, ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, centuries ago.

The last point which I thought was unique to my head disappointed me most. This phenomenon is actually a mix of related phenomena popular in psychology as Facial Feedback theory, which, as I understand, says that not only emotions felt lead to expressions shown, the train goes the other way too. This again can be traced back to Darwin, but a more specific research was first done 50 years ago by a certain Tomkins. This is one of the theories in a wider topic called Cognitive Appraisal, which is a fancy name given to the process of understanding something to be associated with a certain emotion (the decoding of emotional input in the brain).

Another theory, called Misattribution of Emotion, which was a modification the Two-Factor theory given by some guys called Schacter and Singer, also 50 yrs ago, is also one of the theories of Cognitive Appraisal. The Misattribution of Emotion theory, as I understand states that the internal state that results from a certain emotion, might in another situation, cause arousal of that emotion. The simplest example, that I had also experienced, and yet again led me to believe that this was something I had discovered, is this –
Your heart-rate increases when you are fearful. Also, your heart-rate increases when you have worked out. This increased heart-rate could be sensed as fear in some situations, or even increase fear in already fearful situations. My personal experience was doing heavy work that got my heart racing, and then hearing the phone ring that could be for a possible interview. That induced great fear and nervousness, more than I’d normally experience.

So this is how my confidence was yet again shattered. I understood now what I had read as a status of a friend on facebook. If you’ve got an idea, google it, and you’ll discover that it is 50 yrs old. But here I say that you shouldn’t be disheartened, you are good enough if you can find a new thing to apply to that old idea. As my friend just now suggested, “winners don’t do different things, they do things differently“.

Ugh, I’m disgusted with my brain. I see people walking down the street and there’s like this killer inside me providing running nasty commentary about each person. Do you do this also?

I have to stop myself often: “You don’t know this person who is randomly crossing the street. You can’t possibly know that he’s a cheating lying rich Hamptons-worshipping whoremongering obnoxious trust fund baby with a 17-year-old mistress on the side who doesn’t wipe, who doesn’t wash, who would wish nothing better than to see you die.” You can’t know that! So why do I think it? Most people crossing the street probably think that about me also. Who is that freak? Is he homeless? Why can’t he comb his hair? Why is his fly open? Is he a child molesting pervert?

Most people are pretty crappy. But not all. And even the ones who are no good and…

1. Being non-judgmental: It isn’t right because it doesn’t exist. Do you think highly of people who judge others? I don’t think so. If you dislike someone judging another, you just disliked a person for doing something not directly harmful to you. You know what you did? You judged the other person. Your head said this, ‘he judges others, he is bad’.

2. Being Judgmental: So are you a perfect human-being? Do you even need to answer that? I don’t know who defined ‘perfect’ in this highly relative world. People judge because they have imperfect lives, and they think that by pointing out others’ shortcomings, they can improve theirs, or simply because deep down, they are envious of some aspect of the target person.

3. Being Indifferent: Not being judgmental doesn’t mean you become indifferent, you just have to think before reaching conclusions, and think again before taking an action.

4. Learning from other’s mistakes: Our parents’/elders tell us to learn from their mistakes. This is neither very practical, nor necessary. Some one comes and tells you something/someone is bad, your first reaction would be to dislike the target object, avoid it. But take your own chance in the person or thing in question. Most people/things/events are relative. People differ in different situations. Their behaviour toward you depends a lot on your behaviour toward them. Make your own mistakes.

5. Taking things seriously: We all have lives, and they get difficult at times. Do silly things. Abuse someone, have a fight, break furniture even. Apologise to yourself and any other person who got hurt, don’t go apologising to the world, Society does dictate a lot of our behaviour, but if we start with these little changes, society could be more forgiving, a little chilled out.

6. Not taking anything seriously: So you are super-cool? Great. But sometimes, your coolness isn’t enough for the people around you. Sometimes people notice little things in your behaviour toward them, so be just a little more thoughtful of the other individual’s feelings.

7. Gender Roles: Feminists and others who protest about random things to bring change in the society, have you seen the biology of yourself? Men and women have completely different bodies, we’d all look the same if we were not supposed to have gender roles. Men have big muscles because they were originally responsible for hunting etc, while the women would rear the progeny. But also, we are not in 21st century b.c., and most of the work men and women do today is take a car/bus to the work-place, sit on a chair, think and write. Apart from some professions, none of the two are using much muscle power. So, feminists, go on! 😛

8. Slim and beautiful: This is crazy wrong. Slim is not beautiful. For more details, watch a video/read an article on how our bodies are structured, what they are meant to do, and what role genes play in all this. Healthy is beautiful, and it is not necessarily synonymous with Slim.

All this is super-confusing, articles on the internet can’t mould perfect behaviour, only real life experience can! 🙂